Honolulu: A Novel

One

When I was a young child growing up in Korea, it was said that the image of the fading moon at daybreak, reflected in a pond or stream or even a well, resembled the speckled shell of a dragon’s egg. A dragon embodied the yang, the masculine principle of life, and it was thought that if a couple expecting a child prayed to the dragon’s egg, their offspring would be male. Of course, every family in those days desired a son over a daughter. Only men could carry on the family line; women were merely vessels by which to provide society with an uninterrupted supply of men. So every day for months before I was born, my parents would rise before dawn, carrying offerings of fresh-steamed rice cakes to the stone well behind our home, as the sky brightened and snuffed out the stars. And they would pray to the pale freckled face of the moon floating on the water’s surface, pray that the child growing inside my mother’s womb would be a boy.

In this they were to be disappointed. On the third day of the First Moon in the Year of the Rooster, their first and only daughter was born to them. In those waning days of the Yi Dynasty, newborn girls were not deemed important enough to be graced with formal names, but were instead given nicknames. Often these represented some personal characteristic: Cheerful, Pretty, Little One, Big One. Sometimes they presumed to be commandments: Chastity, or Virtue. A few—Golden Calf, Little Flower—verged on the poetic. But too many names reflected the parents’ feelings about the birth of a daughter. I knew a girl named Anger, and another called Pity. More than a few were known as Sorrow or Sadness. And everyone had heard the story of the father who named his firstborn daughter One is Okay, his next, Perhaps After the Second, the third, Three Laughs, and the last, Four Shames.

As for me, my parents named me Regrettable—eventually shortened to simply Regret.

Koreans seldom address one another by their given names; we believe a person’s name is a thing of intimacy and power, not to be used casually by anyone but a family member or close friend. When I was very young, Regret was merely a name to me, signifying nothing more than that. But as I grew older and learned it held another meaning, it became a stone weight in my heart. A call to supper became a reminder of my unfortunate presence at the dinner table. A stern rebuke by my father—Regret, what are we to do with you?—seemed to hint that my place in the family was impermanent. Too young to understand the real reasons, I wondered what was wrong with me to make me so unwanted. Was I too short? I wasn’t as tall as my friend Sunny, but not nearly so short as her sister Lotus. Was I too plain? I spent hours squinting into the mirror, judging my every feature, and found them wanting. My eyes were set too close together, my nose was too small, or maybe it was too big; my lips were thin, my ears flat. It was clear to see, I was plain and unlovely—no wonder my parents regretted my birth.

In truth, my father was merely old-fashioned and conservative, a strict adherent to Confucian ideals, one of which was the inherent precedence of man over woman: The wife must regard her husband as heavenly; what he does is a heavenly act and she can only follow him. I was a girl, I would eventually marry and become part of someone else’s family; as such my existence was simply not of the same consequence as that of my three brothers, who would carry on the family line and provide for our parents when they became old.

But I knew none of this when I was young, and instead decided it was due to the shape of my nose or the color of my eyes; and for years to come I would fret over and find fault with the girl who looked back at me from the mirror.

I have traveled far from the land of my birth, and even farther from who I was then. More than forty years and four thousand miles separate us: the girl of sixteen who took that first unwitting step forward, and the woman in her sixtieth year who now, in sight of the vast Pacific, presumes to memorialize this journey in mere words. It is a journey measured not in time or distance, but in the breadth of one’s soul and the struggle of becoming.

*   *   *

Westerners count their age by the number of years completed on their birthdays, but in Korea one’s personal age is determined differently. A newborn child is said to be already in its first year of life, and thus is deemed to be one year old at birth. I was born in the Year of the Rooster—roughly corresponding to the Western year 1897—and upon the next lunar New Year in 1898, I turned two; in 1899, I was three; and so forth. This sounds confusing, I know, so hereafter, when speaking of ages, I shall do so according to Western reckoning.

My early life was typically Korean, at least for Koreans of a certain rank. Our family was yangban—we belonged to the country gentry and lived in a fine house with a tiled roof in a little village called Pojogae, not far from the city of Taegu, in Ky˘ongsang Province. Pojogae means dimple, and the village—mostly houses of mud and stone, their roofs thatched with rice grass—rested in a dimple of land surrounded by rolling hills. In winter these hills were draped in snow, but when I was very small my eldest brother, Joyful Day, revealed to me that their white shawls were actually made of rice, the most delicious in all the land: They’re called the Rice Mountains, he explained solemnly, and people come from all over the kingdom to gather grains to plant their own rice paddies. Why, wars have even been fought over that rice.

I used to beg him to take me there, but he would just smile and shake his head. The best-tasting rice in the world shouldn’t be eaten so early in a person’s life, he would say, but saved for later.

What kind of rice grows in winter? I asked once, upon reaching the worldly age of five.

His reply: Winter rice, of course!

This sounded eminently logical, and I continued to believe in the legend of the Rice Mountains for longer than I care to admit.

Mine were good brothers—two older, one younger—and for the first six years of my life we played together, up and down the twisting banks of Dragontail Stream, along the entire length and breadth of our little valley. Father would not have approved had he known, as girls were not supposed to have fun with their brothers. But this all came to an end in my seventh year, when Confucian tradition decreed that boys and girls were to be strictly separated, like wheat from chaff. As in most Korean homes, my father and brothers lived in the outermost of two L-shaped wings, each with its own rooms and courtyard, which nestled close together but stood worlds apart. Since only men were permitted to have dealings with the outside world, they occupied the Outer Room. And as the women’s realm was that of sewing and cooking and raising children, we inhabited the Inner Room.

Now, the most contact I had with my brothers was at mealtimes, when Mother and I would carry in the dining tables, set them on the floor, and serve bowls of steaming rice and mandu dumplings to the men of the house, who always ate first. We hovered nearby, out of sight but never out of earshot, in case they needed more kimchi—a spicy side dish made from fermented cabbage, garlic, and red peppers—or a cup of ginseng tea. Only after they had eaten their fill were we women permitted to return to the kitchen and there consume what food remained. In the course of serving them, I might get a wink or a smile now and then from Joyful Day or my second brother, Glad Son … but the days of games and companionship between us were over, and I missed them sorely. I missed my brothers’ teasing. For the first time I began to feel acutely the lack of a sister.

There were only three females in our household: my mother, my grandmother, and me. Grandmother, never seen without her long bamboo pipe, was Father’s mother, and a more rancorous old crone never lived. She treated my mother as a beast of burden, addressing her by a Korean term roughly translatable as that thing or what-you-may-call-her, as in:

You there, what-you-may-call-her, fetch me some more tobacco!

"Yes, halmoni," Mother said, obeying without complaint.

In this Grandmother was merely following long-standing precedent. New brides moving into their husbands’ ancestral home were expected to kowtow to the every whim of their mothers-in-law, who did not hesitate to take full advantage of the situation. They, after all, had once been daughters-in-law kowtowing to their mothers-in-law, and now felt entitled to receive in kind.

What’s that look you’re giving me, girl? Grandmother snapped, having glimpsed a shadow of disapproval on my face.

"Nothing, halmoni," I told her.

You think you know everything, don’t you? But you don’t. Someday, she said smugly, you will be me, and then you’ll understand.

I gave her a cold look, thinking, I will never be you, Grandmother, and retreated into the kitchen to help Mother wash the breakfast dishes.

It was a breezy autumn morning, and through our rice-paper windows I could hear the chatter of fallen leaves scuttling across the ground outside. I was anxious to finish my chores and go out to play. My brothers were leaving for school, and though I had some mild curiosity about what they did there—my parents, like most Confucians, revered learning and stressed its importance to their sons—those chattering leaves spoke more eloquently to me than the vague benefits of an education, which in any event was only for boys.

When the last dish was dry I hurried outside and joined Sunny, who lived next door; her family, too, was yangban, though they owned less farmland than mine and lived in a smaller house. We began a game of shuttlecock in the road, but as often as we succeeded in batting the feathered ball between us, the wind would step in like a third player, scoop the ball up in a gusty hand, and send it spiraling away from us. We found this less frustrating than amusing, and there was much laughing and giggling as we chased the ball down. I raised my paddle and found myself fielding a whirlwind of leaves that swept in between us, swatting not the ball but a windblown scrap of paper that flew up and into my path.

I tore it off my paddle and was about to toss it aside, when I noticed that this wasn’t just a scrap of old newspaper, but what looked like a page out of a book. I say looked because at this time I had absolutely no acquaintance with the printed word. I could read neither Chinese characters nor hangul, the native Korean alphabet; words were an enigma to me, each letter a puzzle I could not hope to solve. All I could tell from the browned, brittle page was that it was obviously from a very old book—perhaps one that had fallen apart and been discarded by its owner, only to have its pages plucked from the garbage heap by a stray puff of wind.

I examined it more closely, noting the elegant black strokes stacked up in neat columns, and though I couldn’t fathom their meaning, I was impressed by the graceful and delicate calligraphy.

Isn’t this pretty? I said, showing the page to Sunny.

Some of the marks were little more than vertical or horizontal lines with crimped ends. Some resembled upside-down wishbones, while others were a combination of circles, squares, slashes, squiggles, and dots. All seemed beautiful and mysterious to me.

"It’s hangul," Sunny said, I think. More than that she couldn’t say because she was not able to read, either. Another bellow of wind sent the shuttle ball airborne again and Sunny raced after it.

On a whim, I slipped the scrap of paper into the waistband of my skirt—traditional Korean clothes, or hanbok, have no pockets—and resumed our game.

Later, alone in my room, the page presented its mysteries to me anew. I had never had any real curiosity before about these things called words, but the frustration I now felt at my inability to decipher these marks drove me to an uncharacteristically bold move: After supper I sneaked out of the Inner Room and into the men’s quarters, where I hesitantly approached Joyful Day as he studied, alone, from a schoolbook.

Elder brother? I said in a low tone.

He glanced up, surprised. Little sister, you shouldn’t be in here. But the admonishment was softened by a smile.

I know, I said, but may I ask a great favor of you?

I showed him what I had found and asked if he knew the meaning of the writing on the page.

His eyes tracked across the markings, right to left, then he turned the page over and examined the other side as well. It seems to be some kind of … travel narrative, he said.

What is that?

"An account of someone’s journey to a faraway place. It appears to have been written by a yangban woman, judging by some talk of her maidservants, while visiting a place called Kwanbuk."

I was thunderstruck by this. Women can write words? Onto paper?

He smiled at that. Some do. Some even publish what they write, though for heaven’s sake don’t tell Father I said so.

"But what does it say?"

Nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. It simply relates how the woman went to view a sunrise.

Would you read it to me?

Bemused by my interest, he asked, If I do, will you then go back to the Inner Room?

Yes, yes, I agreed.

He began to read aloud: ‘All was bathed in the serene light of the moon. The sea was whiter than the night before, and a gale chilled my bones…’

I listened, rapt and silent, as he conjured from the cold black type the image of a woman of many years past, shivering in the chill predawn light as she waited for the sun to rise. There was nothing as thrilling or dramatic about the narrative as in the folktales my mother and grandmother sometimes told me—but the woman’s vivid descriptions of the lake, the sky, and the rising sun were nonetheless enthralling. The light from below the horizon appeared as rolls of red silk spread on the sea, and then slowly there arose a strange object the size of my palm, glowing like a charcoal on the last night of the month.

The words, her words, entranced me. For the first time I understood that these lines and slashes contained entire worlds within them. The rising sun was like a charcoal on the last night of the month. How could that be? I asked myself. How could something be two different things at once? How could these little chicken scratches contain so much?

Suddenly my brother stopped in mid-sentence, coming up short where the page itself came to an end. That’s all there is, alas. Now, before Father sees you and scolds us both…

I thanked him, took the page, and crept back to my room.

There I used a piece of charcoal to copy some of the markings onto a scrap of butcher’s paper. But without my brother’s mediation, they were once again an unfathomable collection of lines and squiggles. I knew they held meaning, I remembered the words Joyful Day had spoken, but like a bad magician I could not summon them on my own.

Now each morning I found myself studying my father as he read his morning paper, wondering what those columns of black type might be saying to him. I felt a pang of envy for the first time as my brothers set off for school, and in the evenings I sneaked in and stole glances as they read by candlelight from their school primers. But of course I knew better than to expect I could ever do the same. Girls, at least girls in rural villages like Pojogae, did not go to school; I might envy a bird the power of flight, but I knew perfectly well that I could not be a bird.

And yet—I kept that page. I kept it against the faint, perhaps impossible hope that someday I might learn how to coax the meaning from those enigmatic marks. Until then, it remained silent in my presence—a silence I would be forced to abide for another eight years.

*   *   *

By the time I turned fifteen, in the Year of the Rat—by the Western calendar, 1912—Confucian tradition forbade me from leaving the house without an escort. I was no longer free to play in the street with Sunny, or to go into the foothills to pick wildflowers, and I chafed at having to spend my every waking hour in the Inner Room or Inner Court. On the rare occasions when I was permitted to leave, I was required to wear a long green veil that covered all of my increasingly womanly body but for a slit through which my eyes could peek. From this I drew the conclusion that the physical changes I was experiencing were unsightly to society, thus making me even more insecure about my appearance.

There were only two respites from the tedium of the Inner Room. The first came each afternoon before we began cooking supper, when Mother and I would retire to her room and sew together. This was my favorite hour of the day—what Mother and I called our thimble time. I had learned how to thread a needle before I was barely out of diapers, or so it seemed. I was proud that after years of practice I was able to sew as many as ten stitches in a single inch—but Mother could stitch twelve! A gifted seamstress, she made all of the household’s clothes: the men’s waist-length white jackets and baggy white trousers, as well as the short yellow jackets and pleated red skirts I wore as an unmarried girl. But her talents shone most brightly in the wrapping cloths she loved to make.

In the West, people carry bags or briefcases; in Korea, they carry important papers, gifts, indeed objects of all sorts, wrapped in cloths woven of brilliant colors and rich textures. The most elaborate, called su po, had once been used in the Royal Palace—back in the days before the Japanese came and deposed our king—and were embroidered with a single design, geometric or pictorial. Favorite images were trees, fruit, flowers, butterflies, or birds. Mother made several such designs for local gentry and each was exquisite: I remember one that vividly depicted a funnel of windblown snowflakes against a sky-blue field, and another portraying a flock of cranes dipping their beaks in a river, as gold-flecked fish swam just below the waterline.

But Mother also made another kind of wrapping cloth, one that was usually the province of commoners: the chogak po, or patchwork cloths. These were cobbled together from leftover scraps of varying shapes—wedges, squares, rectangles, triangles—and fabrics such as linen, cotton, ramie, silk, whatever was at hand. The different materials, weaves, and patterns were stitched together into a mosaic of crossed lines and no apparent design. There was an abstract beauty to them, to be sure, but one day I asked Mother why she bothered to make these patchworks when she was capable of much more elegant and harmonic creations.

She thought for a moment, then said, "When we are young, we think life will be like a su po: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths—bits and pieces, odds and ends—people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps. There is harmony in this, too, and beauty. I suppose that is why I like the chogak po."

I was old enough to know that she meant this as a positive statement, and I nodded to let her know that I understood the wisdom of what she had said. But I was also young enough to find the idea that my life was to be made up of odds and ends I didn’t want—frayed, ragged remnants like these, together forming a rather motley whole—a little terrifying.

My only other release from the monotony of the Inner Room came on those days when Mother and I would don our veils and carry our laundry in big wicker baskets to the stream, where we would join other village women washing clothes. We were always careful to walk only on the left side of the road; men walked on the right, and whenever we encountered one we averted our gazes, never making the slightest eye contact as we maintained a virtuous silence. But today the only men we saw were a squad of Japanese military police in their glossy brown uniforms, like a swarm of bronze-backed dung beetles, marching somewhere with great urgency. We kept our eyes downcast, less out of decorum than fear.

It had been only three years since our nation, our Land of Morning Calm, had been annexed—swallowed whole by the voracious Japanese Empire, which had long coveted it. Fear had since become as much a part of our daily diet as rice or water. We had accustomed ourselves to the sight of Japanese police—often accompanied by Korean assistants dressed in black—descending upon us like vipers to root out insurgents or search for caches of hidden arms. They might come at any hour, breaking down house gates, pulling men and even women from their homes in the hush of the night—a hush broken by the sound of imperious shouting in Japanese and terrified wails in Korean.

But this morning the police merely hurried by, taking no notice of us, and Mother and I let out a shared breath as they passed.

At the stream we rinsed our clothes in cool running water, then pounded and ironed them with laundry bats (an implement resembling a cross between a rolling pin and an American baseball bat). There was something soothing about the rhythmic thop thop thop of a dozen-odd laundry bats wielded against stone, like the comforting beat of one’s own heart. As we washed, Mother could gossip with neighbors and I would pass the time with Sunny.

Have you heard? my friend asked, as she wrung water from a pair of white cotton trousers. "Three girls attending Ewha School in Seoul will be graduating college—the first in the whole country! She added hopefully, Perhaps I might attend it someday."

I sighed. A week did not pass without some flight of fancy on Sunny’s part. Without looking up I said, There’s a palace there, too, quite nice by all accounts. Perhaps I might live in it someday.

She looked stung. "It’s possible. I could go."

Seoul is as far from Pojogae as the earth is from the sun, I said. How would you even get there?

I don’t know. Isn’t there a train that goes there?

I found this conversation more irritating than most of Sunny’s fancies, and I let my frustrations out on the skirt I was pounding with my laundry bat.

When you are attending school in Seoul, I said brusquely, let me know when the palace becomes vacant. Sunny frowned and said no more on the subject—that day or ever again.

But far more disquieting was the sight that greeted us upon returning to town. The squad of Japanese police we had encountered earlier in the day had arrested a man, beaten him bloody, and was now preparing to demonstrate to our village the brutal folly of harboring rebels. They stripped the man’s shirt from his back and tied his manacled hands to a chain hanging from the rear of a horse-drawn wagon. Only then did I recognize their prisoner.

Mother, I whispered, isn’t that Mr. Hong?

He was our greengrocer, and the father of a friend of mine.

Hush! Mother hissed, and I quickly fell silent.

The wagon driver snapped the horse’s reins and it took off at a trot. We watched in horror and disgust but did not dare turn away, lest this be noted by the police. Mr. Hong, manacled and shirtless, was dragged on his back through the streets, the gravel raking and grinding his flesh like pepper in a mill. His left eye was swollen shut, his face purpled with bruises, but he remained defiantly silent, refusing to give up even a single cry of pain.

Then the wagon turned a corner, and none of us ever saw him again.

*   *   *

In fact, the conflict with Japan had begun years before. In 1895, our Queen Min, who was fiercely opposed to Japanese interference in Korea, was stabbed to death by agents of Japan. Ten years later, Korea was declared a Japanese protectorate, and five years after that we were annexed. Not everyone in our country would give it up without a fight, and I’m proud to say that our provincial militia in Kyŏngsang-do fought most bravely and bitterly against the Japanese army. But in the end, a dragonfly is no challenge to a dragon, and our province fell like all the others—though there would be scattered guerrilla warfare against our colonial occupiers for years to come.

The Imperial Government insisted that Korean children learn the Japanese language in school. They also banned the teaching of Korean history and language, and burned hundreds of thousands of books that dared to suggest Korea had ever been an independent nation. They were determined to turn the next generation of Koreans into Japanese.

You might think that little Pojogae, far from the corridors of politics, would have been relatively untouched by all this. Yet rural villages like ours were much more central to the conflict than you might imagine. Japan needed food for its people and intended Korea to be its breadbasket. Farmers—and the landed gentry like my father, who leased them their land—were forced to abandon almost all other crops but rice, then saw their harvests confiscated for the exclusive use of the Japanese. We who grew the rice were not allowed to consume it, and had to subsist instead on the small plots of barley, millet, and beans we planted.

My eldest brother’s fanciful whimsy of the Rice Mountains had come, in a way, into grim existence.

Meat became a scarcer sight on our table, and we could no longer afford the services of a servant girl from the village who had helped us keep house. Mother—who managed the household finances—was now scrimping and saving scraps of cloth for more than just aesthetic reasons, or turning our clothes inside out and restitching them to get some further wear out of them.

And yet, I must be grateful to the Japanese for one thing, if only one thing: were it not for them, Blossom would never have entered my life.

She simply appeared in our home one morning, a five-year-old moppet with a long braid of black hair down her back and a sweet oval of a face that was everything mine was not: delicate, fine-featured, lovely. She was in the kitchen helping Mother peel a clove of garlic when I entered, still blinking sleep from my eyes. I stopped short upon seeing her, wondering perhaps if she were a new servant girl. Mother didn’t even look up from preparing breakfast: Daughter, this is your new sister-in-law, Blossom, of the Shin clan of Songso.

I stared uncomprehendingly at the little girl, who offered me a small smile. But this was apparently not sufficient response for Mother, who poked her in the arm and said, in a tone I had never heard in her voice before, Where are your manners, girl? What do you say?

"Good morning, honorable shinui, Blossom greeted me. The word meant husband’s sister," but how could this slip of a child have a husband?

Mother said, She is betrothed to marry Goodness of the East—my younger brother—when he comes of age. In the meantime, she’ll live with us and learn how to attend her wifely duties. To Blossom she added reproachfully, Your husband will waste away and die waiting for you to finish that garlic.

I’m sorry, honorable mother-in-law, the girl apologized, and quickly finished peeling the clove.

I was still confused, though not, of course, at the idea of the betrothal. In those days all marriages were arranged by one’s parents, either directly or indirectly through the services of a marriage broker. As a young girl the notion of marrying for romantic love never entered my mind. Nor was it unheard of for families to take in a minmyonuri—a daughter-in-law in training, as it were—though I had always heard it spoken of disparagingly. No, what baffled me was that my parents had arranged a marriage for Goodness of the East, who was but eight years old, while my two elder brothers and I were still unbetrothed!

I was peeved enough that for the next few days I made no attempt to befriend my new sister-in-law, too busy fretting that I saw no sign of my parents finding a husband for me. Blossom and I worked side by side at household tasks, but exchanged few words. We slept in the same room, but at night the only sound was the sigh of warm air flowing through the heating flues beneath the floor.

Then one afternoon—during which, I couldn’t help but notice, Blossom braved the wintry cold to carry at least ten buckets of water back and forth from our well—I finished my own chores and entered the Inner Court to take what little sun I could find. There I found Blossom, standing silently at the base of the high wall enclosing the courtyard, gazing up wistfully. Her cheeks were chafed red from the chill; her nose was runny. And there was such longing in her eyes as she looked up—at what, I wondered?—that I asked her if anything was wrong.

Honorable sister-in-law, she said, could you help me up to the top of the wall? Just for a minute?

I was puzzled, but couldn’t bring myself to say no. I overturned a large clay flowerpot, stepped onto it, then reached down and scooped Blossom up in my arms. I gave her the boost she needed to clamber atop the wall, where she settled herself on the ledge and peered intently into a distance I could not see. Curious, I pulled myself up and sat beside her, our legs dangling over the edge of the Inner Wall. I followed her gaze across the blue tiled rooftops of the Outer Rooms, but all I saw was the road leading out of Pojogae and into the hills, where dark clouds pressed down on snowy summits.

Do you see something out there? I asked.

After a moment she just shook her head. No, she said quietly. I just wondered if maybe my papa was coming back for me.

I had built a wall around her in my mind, but with these few plaintive words it was breached as easily as this wall of stone.

Her father, she told me, had been a well-to-do yangban farmer, until the Japanese took his farm and cast Blossom’s family from their ancestral home. Now penniless, her father went to work as a field laborer, but his pitiful wages were insufficient to feed eight children. Somehow my own father heard of his plight and offered to raise their youngest child as a bride for Goodness of the East. Normally, families of the upper classes would never have resorted to minmyonuri marriage, but circumstances were difficult for both clans. Blossom’s parents had one less mouth to feed and received four yen in payment—about two American dollars. In return my family received the services of a bride-in-waiting to replace the servant girl we could no longer afford, a virtual slave to the household.

I felt shame for my clan, and guilt when I looked at Blossom.

She spoke of her own family—her parents, five sisters, two brothers—with tenderness, longing, and the fear that she might never see any of them again. I could hardly tell her otherwise; even daughters-in-law wed in the traditional manner seldom saw their birth families again, especially if their new homes were far distant. She began to weep, and without a conscious thought, I took her into my arms, the only comfort I could offer. I held her against me, let her head rest against my breast as she wept, and resolved to myself that from now on I would try to be more than just a sister-in-law to her: I would try to be a sister.

*   *   *

Mother worked Blossom harder than she had ever worked our servant girl, but I helped her with her chores whenever Mother wasn’t looking. When we had free time, we enjoyed board games like go and yut, or played seesaw in the Inner Court. (Legend holds that seesaws became popular with girls because on the upswing they were able to catch a glimpse of the world beyond their cloistered walls.) Since Blossom was so young, there were no rigid restrictions yet on her movements, and this worked to my advantage as well. I would tell Father that Blossom wished to play down by the stream or pick wildflowers on the slopes of the near hills. Father, of course, wouldn’t permit her to go alone and appointed me her escort. I always protested a little for the sake of plausibility, and soon the two of us were free of the stifling sameness of the Inner Room for an hour or two.

On New Year’s Day, Blossom and I rose early to help Mother cook the food to be offered to our ancestors on this first day of the Year of the Ox. It was Mother’s responsibility to prepare for these ancestral feasts, up to ten a year, though as females we were not permitted to take part in them. We merely carried in the dining tables and set out the food in the appropriate attitudes—fish on the east side of the table, meat on the west. Joyful Day, as eldest son, poured wine into the ancestors’ wine bowls, laid chopsticks across the plates, and placed spoons for the soup; then, kneeling, he led the ceremony honoring the past four generations of our forebears, as Mother, Blossom, and I listened from the kitchen.

Afterward we ate, each in our own turn. Mother’s New Year’s Soup was always delicious, though there was more rice and dough in it this year than chicken, and no pheasant at all. I drank a bowl of rice wine too quickly and got a little tipsy. Grandmother had several bowls and became quite the cheerful drunk: She was much nicer to be around when half-pickled than sober, calling my mother dear, dear daughter-in-law as if she had been possessed by spirits—as I suppose she had! Would that we could have gotten her to drink more during the other moons of the year.

As Blossom and I played inside, the boys took the kites they had been building all winter and cast them to the winds. The traditional Korean kite was an oblong or rectangle—a mulberry-paper skin stretched across a framework of bamboo sticks—with a circular hole in the middle, the diameter of which was exactly half the kite’s width, for greater stability and control. It was always colorfully painted: A kite with a red half-circle on its face was called a red half-moon kite; one with stripes of green, red, and blue was a tricolor skirt kite; and so on. Some kites were not rectangular but resembled an octopus with eight flapping arms. None had tails. The boys would use a horned wooden reel to let out the lengthening string, and the kites would ascend gloriously into the skies.

During these first two weeks of the First Moon the boys would also engage in kite fighting. They dipped their kite strings in a mixture of glue and glass powder, then dried them to a coarse edge, so when the kites were aloft the strings became razors. Each boy would try to steer his string so that the serrated glass edge would slice like a knife through another boy’s string, neatly severing it, and watch his opponent’s kite go spinning away on the wind.

Blossom and I observed this pageantry from atop the wall of the Inner Court. From a distance the white, green, red, yellow, and black kites diving and slashing at one another looked like a flock of brightly feathered parrots quarreling amongst themselves, with an occasional bird taking off in a snit for parts unknown.

Then on the fifteenth day of the moon, all the kite flyers wrote the words Away Evils, Come Blessings on their kites and took to the skies one last time. It was said that thirteen hundred years before, during a trying time in our nation’s history, a famous general had tried to calm civil unrest by sending a kite bearing a burning cotton ball into the night skies. The people saw it as a falling star returning to heaven—a sign that the nation’s current misfortunes would be ending. Ever since, on the fifteenth day of the New Year, boys all across the land would unreel their kites, long threads having been attached beforehand to the kite strings. Once the kites were airborne the boys would strike a match and light a fuse to the threads; as the kites flew higher, the sparks would race up the threads and finally reach the strings, which would then burst into flame, setting loose the kites.

From our house Blossom and I could see dozens of flames igniting in midair, and watched the brilliantly colored kites fly free, borne away on updrafts, drifting toward the distant hills.

How far will they go? Blossom asked excitedly.

Very far, I predicted. At least as far as Taegu.

Will they reach the ocean?

Some of them, I’m sure.

Will they go all the way to America, do you think?

I have no doubt of it, I said with a smile.

From our high perch atop the wall we watched the kites bobbing and spinning on the wind, like caged birds set wildly free. Would either of us have ever dreamed that soon I would be following in those kites’ imaginary wake?

Two

If Blossom was one piece of my chogak po, another patch would be added later in that Year of the Ox when Mother’s elder sister, Obedience, fell ill. Widowed and living alone in Taegu, she was guilty of the worst crime a Korean woman could commit: a failure to produce heirs. Not even a daughter, my father would say with pity and contempt. Producing sons was the highest duty of every woman, and those who failed to live up to that duty were often ridiculed and shunned. But Mother would not forsake Aunt Obedience and petitioned Father to allow her to go to Taegu to care for her. Father grumbled a bit about it—it was customary to bring lavish gifts to one’s in-laws, which we could ill afford—but he did not gainsay Mother the trip. Besides, it was a good excuse to sell some of our eggs at the market in Taegu. I quickly volunteered to help Mother carry the eggs and was delighted when Father agreed that I could accompany her. A trip outside the Inner Room was thrilling enough, but a trip to the city—I was beside myself with glee, though of course it was indecorous to show it.

I don’t know how you can stand that festering sore of a city, Father told Mother. He disliked Taegu and avoided going there, I suspected, because as a member of the country gentry he had no social standing in the city and was not accorded the kind of deference and respect he received in Pojogae. I think that may have been why he took such pains to be a strict Confucian—so none could dispute his aristocratic lineage, even if we weren’t rich like other yangban.

Mother and I would be gone an entire week, during which one of the village women, with help from Blossom, would cook and clean for Father. We planned to leave before dawn in order to arrive at the marketplace by early morning. The day before we left I went to the henhouse and set about filling up egg cribs. These were long open cradles made of woven straw, each holding about ten eggs—they looked rather like elongated bird’s nests, with little loops of straw to secure each egg in place. After I had filled seven cribs Father adjudged that the amount was sufficient and secured them onto a jige—two pieces of pine bound together with straw at an angle that makes them look like the English letter A. It also held our clothes, as well as presents of rice wine and sweet cakes for Aunt Obedience. The next day, in the early morning darkness, Mother and I donned our veils, I hoisted the jige onto my back, and we began the eight-mile walk to the city. (Other yangban women were often